


Benificence

by Ladycat



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Friendship, M/M, Post: s05e22 Not Fade Away, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-11
Updated: 2014-02-11
Packaged: 2018-01-12 00:04:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1179533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladycat/pseuds/Ladycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Willow’s laughter was mellow and rich like the merlot he had waiting for him at home. “Get these, Xander.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Benificence

He smelled her perfume long before she settled onto the sofa next to him. Little hands, white except for two thin, twisting scars in the web of her thumb, the nails tipped with something iridescent and shiny took the magazine he’d been reading and put it in her own lap. The glossy photos, all too-bright colors and airbrushed perfection, looked fake against the soft suede of her skirt. Xander traced the darker sections, brushed against the grain, while she frowned thoughtfully.

“So ... we’re looking for something?” she guessed.

Sighing, Xander let his head fall against the back of the sofa. Instinct had him take her hand into his, palms pressed together. Her skin was so soft, and not just in comparison to his callused roughness. It was as delicate as a baby’s and Xander caressed the heel of her thumb absently. “We’re shopping,” he said, disgusted and not bothering to hide it. “Except we don’t know what we’re shopping _for_.”

“And we’re looking in a catalog of weapons for it?” Willow shifted just a little, bumping her shoulder against his in a long-familiar signal. Xander heard her sigh as twisted, half-curling around her so that he could rest his head on the edge of the thin, bird-bones that made up her body. She always felt so little to him, when he held her like this. The first second always came with a sense of strangeness: the radiating power she could no longer contain—so hot it always made him relax and tinged with gold whenever he shut his eye—made her seem much larger in his mind’s eye. 

He was surrounded by tiny women who were giants to him.

“Is it for Buffy?” Those little fingers, still as nimble as when they’d been twelve and she’d silently sewn the worst of his torn clothes into acceptable propriety, trailed over his hair. “Because weapons probably aren’t the best gift for her, right now. What with the whole retreat thingie she’s on.”

Willow’s inflection made the word sound like Buffy was at a conference, or a week-long vacation she desperately needed. Xander knew that her ‘retreat’ really was just that, tactical and all. He couldn’t blame her, though. It just made him sad. “No, not for Buffy.”

“Okay. Xander ... you know we aren’t going to suddenly change our minds and send you back to Africa, right? I mean, okay, Giles might for the five seconds it takes me to levitate a crowbar into the room, anyway,” Willow teased. If he looked, he’d see her eyes leaf-green and concerned. He didn’t look. “There’s so much that needs to be done here, too. Or you could go on vacation and not think about anything at all for a while—maybe that’d be best?”

Xander thought about moving his head, but her touch was cool and familiar as it ran over his eyes—carefully brushing over the empty socket—to butterfly-kiss his temples. “I don’t need a vacation, Willow, I promise. I’m just—”

“Shopping for someone who would like weapons. I know.”

For so many years, Willow’s breathing was the only lullaby he’d needed to help him fall asleep. The hushed, even cadence, deeper despite a voice that’d grown higher and more strident over the years, made him think of baby powder and a room that always smelled of stuffed animals. Xander let himself drift on that sound. It’d been a long, long time since Willow had come to him like this and Xander didn’t want to do anything that might disturb it.

He’d missed this.

“It’s been better, these last couple of years. Right?” Willow didn’t push him away, twisting just enough that she could rest her head against his. The thick curtain of her hair made a soft blanket, the warmth and heaviness deliciously comforting. “Since Angel came back, I mean?”

She didn’t mean Angel, but Xander was willing to let that go for the moment. “Things have run smoother,” he said. More like an actual job, the issues falling into more predictable types as they streamlined fighting the forces of darkness. Bill Gates would be green with envy—if he knew the Council even existed, anyway. He only knew about Xia, who had taken care of his little demonic rat problem with a blink of her gold-slitted eyes. “I like the calmer. I liked Africa, too—don’t make that noise,” he said, smiling when she made an almost honking noise of disbelief. “I really did. Doesn’t mean I can’t not like parts of it, too, Wills. But some of it was ... peaceful. Rejuvenating.”

“That’s a double-negative,” she said primly. It meant that she didn’t understand and disagreed with him, but she didn’t want to fight. She’d regained her tact somewhere along the way and Xander wasn’t at all too proud to say he’d missed it; only one of them could make bluntness into an art form, thank you, and since Cordelia’s death four years earlier that burden fell to him alone.

“Willow ... ”

“I just worry, okay? You’ve always been kind of a loner, Xan, and don’t interrupt me when I’m psychoanalyzing you. I don’t mean you enjoy being lonely, just that you can handle being alone best of all of us. So I get why you liked Africa, but it doesn’t make me worry less about you.”

“That’d be your grandma coming through,” he teased, nudging her head with his. Grandma Rosenberg had been just as intellectual as her son and daughter-in-law, but had had an earthy practicality Willow’s parents had both lacked. Her visits had always come with lectures on how they were raising Willow wrong, attempts to correct that, and _mountains_ of food. Xander had stayed over, those times. “Worry-wart.”

Willow snorted, her fingers so very human—knobby, a little gnarled at the knuckle, and not so perfectly straight as they should have been—tracing over the magazine again. “I like this one,” she said, her fingers resting over a pair of wicked looking throwing knives. The metal gleamed unnaturally bright in the photo, almost obscuring the channels cast into the metal and the hint of engraving down near the hilt. “You should get these.”

“Aren’t they kind of girly?”

Willow’s laughter was mellow and rich like the merlot he had waiting for him at home. “Get these, Xander.”

Eventually, they both separated, her back to Kennedy and the coven, Xander to his flat a mile away. He walked, as he always did, inhaling the damp, chilly air. Six years from Sunnydale and this humid cold still fascinated him even as it made his lungs twist and try and clamp together. He attributed it to so many months in Africa, where cold meant freezing and usually running for your life, given Xander’s job down there. This kind of almost-but-not-quite kept him walking while actual Londoners gave him dirty looks for enjoying what they knew to be thoroughly miserable.

He ordered the knife-set she’d indicated. It had been third on his list of possibilities, which meant he’d done a pretty decent job at deciding. Or at least he hoped. He filled out the send-to address with something small and hard clicking in his throat every time he swallowed, and then pressed ‘process’.

He’d done his job. It would arrive on time, or was supposed to. He ignored the tracking number he was emailed because he didn’t want to know. He’d done what he was supposed to do.

* * * *

The buzzer was loud, like a hoard of beetles hovering beside his door. Half asleep and thoroughly irritated that his lazy Saturday was being interrupted, Xander stumbled over. “Yes?”

“Package for a Harris?”

Package? Oh, no. Xander slumped against the wall, fighting the urge to rub his empty eye—he had a fake one, but he hardly ever wore it. “From who?”

“Er, box says Metallurgy?”

Then it was returned undeliverable. Feeling heavy and numb, Xander mumbled something about being down in a moment. Normally putting on his robe was cause for a chuckle, since the silk extravaganza—a present from Dawn—was as warm and comfortable as a terry-cloth version but made him look like Hugh Heffner on acid. Today, Xander just shoved his feet into slippers and tried not to trip as he headed down the stairs.

“Sorry,” he said as he opened the door, not looking at the delivery guy. “My address must’ve been—”

Alternate dimensions could just appear out of the blue, right? They could just slam up into the ground, so that one moment you were in your normal, safe, boring little world and the next you were somewhere completely different. Where figures wore long black leather coats like a second skin, miles of pale skin stretched taut over lean muscle, visible through black jeans and black t-shirt, silver buckle reflecting in the porch light.

Where blue eyes met his and held them, long dissertations occurring in that single glance.

Xander was distantly aware that the delivery guy was smirking and waving them a cheery goodbye. Distantly, because something was roaring in his ears, an angry lion that was too pissed to stalk its prey any longer, and suddenly he was being held. Strong arms like bands of steel squeezed the breath out of him, squeezed words he couldn’t understand and didn’t try to regulate, his face pressed into a collarbone that hurt his nose, familiar muscles and familiar smells making his knees go weak and his mind swim in shock.

“Red gave me a call,” Spike whispered into his ear. “Thought you were due an anniversary present. A _real_ one.”

“How real?” His voice trembled.

“How about the kind of pressie that involves me havin’ a shouting match with Rupert over splitting us up ever again, without apocalyptic reasons.” A chuckle vibrated through their bodies, taking more of Xander’s ability to hold himself up. Which was okay, since Spike did it for him. “Didn’t find out until later the whole sodding thing was staged. I’m home, pet. Not going again, either. Not without you.”

"Promise?"

Spike lips were soft and tasted of cold and home. "Promise, love."

* * * *

Sometime that evening, Willow knocked on their door. “I won’t interrupt,” she told two sleepy, shirtless men. She was keeping her face straight, but Xander recognized that wicked gleam in her eyes. “Just thought you’d like this.”

She handed over two packages. The first was very familiar, since it’d been left outside when the two of them kissed their way up the stairs. The second, however, was addressed to an _A._ Harris.

Losing her battle, Willow grinned at them impishly. That smile, more than anything, was just so _Willowy_ that it didn’t matter how many years or how many miles had passed—this was the girl Xander had fallen in love with when he was three years old, and the girl he knew he’d grow old with. Beside him, Spike slipped an arm around his waist. “Hey, that’s mine! How’d you get it?”

Clearing her throat, Willow said, “Did you know that I have contacts with DHL who’ll divert packages for me, if I ask really nicely even though it’s completely illegal and if anyone found out, I’d be in trouble in four major countries? Cause I do.” Beaming, she leaned forward to give each of them a kiss. “Happy anniversary, boys. I—hey! No! Don’t you dare hug me without showering first! Ew! Noooo!”

Her squeals disappeared under a tangle of bodies, but her hand, as always, found Xander’s first.


End file.
